VERO BEACH — At 6 p.m., one-time art gallery owner and jewelry designer Kristen Knudsen collapses into a kitchen chair. Her house is immaculate. The jewelry she crafts is carefully arranged on displays in her temporarily decorated garage. Even the yard has a freshly planted bamboo garden, all of it done by her own hand in advance of the Sebastian Art Studio Tour.
“This is the first time I’ve done something within my own living space,” she says. “To tell you the truth, my eyes are bulging a little bit under the pressure.”
And it’s not over. By 7 p.m., she will have called three friends over and opened a bottle of wine to finish the rest of the preparations.
The stream of mostly unfamiliar guests will start arriving at 10 a.m. the next morning. Croissants and champagne will be laid out for them on the back porch.
By afternoon, Knudsen will have opened the magnum of Spanish white wine chilling in the fridge – an Albarino she won for her homemade costume at a Halloween contest at Cork and Tapas, the Vero wine bar.
Knudsen was one of 11 artists who opened their home studios last Saturday, likely going through similar machinations to make their work spaces not just presentable, but instructive: Studio tours are meant to give the public a glimpse at an artist’s inspiration, techniques, materials and outcomes.
Just as a home or garden tour, it may appeal to voyeuristic instincts; artist envy no doubt abounds in the studio tour set.
Unlike a home or garden tour, the works are usually for sale.
This year’s roster included precious metal jewelry maker Marte McMurry; raku potter Richard Ramirez, an art teacher recently arrived from California; and Indian River State College adjunct professor Toni Hill, currently working in digital photography and print making.
Richard Gillmor, the former mayor of Sebastian, a recent candidate for the U.S. House and a talented painter, was also on the tour, as well as Rita Bernstein, who paints on silk.
The tour only began last year after failed efforts by artists living in the north county to include their studios in the Vero Beach Art Club’s similar tour.
The fight for recognition by the strong Sebastian artist community got a major lift when Knudsen opened the ArtsMojo Gallery in the summer of 2006, a valiant three-year effort to draw north island arts patrons to the renovated stretch of Victorian-styled shops along Sebastian’s U.S. 1.
Knudsen says the store’s closure in 2009 was due in part to two separate road construction projects that complicated access to her gallery. The real estate crash didn’t help either as buying art sank on the list of homeownership priorities.
Nevertheless, she has continued to sell at art fairs and festivals as well as through the hand-made and vintage objects website, Etsy.com.
Knudsen’s line of jewelry, Vintage Pie, involves the craft of assemblage.
Interesting old objects – rusted miniature cars, boxes of wooden dominos, and a jar of two-inch long toy hammers are a tiny fraction of her collection, all sorted and organized and whirring in her head, waiting for a place on a necklace or bracelet.
Hand drills, rivets, awls and metal snips fill her workbench, along with a barrel of her latest objects to “upcycle.”
Western-style leather belts that she is transforming into “cowboy” bracelets by chopping them into short lengths, attaching fasteners and riveting various vintage brooches and objects on top.
Another project involves logo-stamped wine corks that she adorns with beads and charms and hangs from a long chain.
Knudsen says in the spring she plans to share her methods in a workshop at the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
A former member of the board of the county’s Cultural Council, she won the cover design contest for the organization’s annual event planner.
Her entry, a cartoon drawing of a creature she dubbed “the culture vulture,” was aimed at drawing younger participants to the council’s website and activities.
The stuffed creation the vulture was patterned after sits on a shelf in her home, shifted from one room to the other as her day-long preparations temporarily stall.
Knudsen tears into a snack-size bag of Lay’s potato chips, stopping to sit at her kitchen table for the first time in hours.
“Junk food, sorry,” she says. “I haven’t had a bite to eat all day.”
She also hasn’t slept well, but that’s nothing new. Though perpetually fresh-faced and bristling with energy, Knudsen often lies awake for hours, unable to sleep, her mind racing with creative vision.
“I’ve always been that way,” she says. “My hands have to be making something.”
Knudsen studied briefly at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston after high school. She studied interior design at Indian River State College when she moved to Vero in 2002.
Mostly, though, she considers herself self-taught. From the time she was a little girl, her parents, both artistic themselves, encouraged her to make art.
“They entered me in every school contest, every window decorating contest in our town,” she says.
While she studied print-making in college, she was at her most creative during the 15 years that she owned an antique store in New Hampshire. She continues to “pick,” as collectors call it, for the objects she turns into art.
Vestiges of those days fill her garage.
For the tour, she has arranged them in thematic groups: toys, pieces of watches, keys, and other bits.
Her creations pack up readily – and she has a collection of vintage luggage to tote them in. Knudsen has set up jewelry-making tables at events like last year’s Plein Air Rendezvous at the Environmental Learning Center.
She was invited to participate in the Festival of Trees benefit at Riverside Theatre, and was one of the artists participating in the Quail Valley charity fund-raiser at the Palm House Gallery last year.
In between the stream of benefits, she was hired to decorate the Vero Macy’s for two Christmases, and worked for two established Vero designers doing interiors of island homes.
For the Sebastian studio tour, she served as public relations coordinator, making appearances on local radio, and working a discount for the printing of 2,000 flyers.
While her retail experience helped her promote the tour, her interior design background clearly influenced her home décor. The living spaces look straight out of a showroom, every piece in place, the tasteful tapestry swags on the windows coordinating with the upholstery and fringed pillows.
The madness, such as it is, begins in her jewelry-making studio.
“Their jaws drop when they get to my studio,” she says, anxiously anticipating Saturday’s audience days in advance of last weekend’s tour. “It’s 8 million little sparkly containers of things and antiques.”
